


Darkness Always Gets There First

by Thistlerose



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:39:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/113973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winona Kirk wants revenge on the mysterious Romulan who killed her husband and her captain.  Life keeps getting in the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkness Always Gets There First

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Lauriegilbert (on Livejournal) for beta reading.

_Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. – Terry Pratchett_

* * * *

 

When Winona Kirk went back into space, she took her wedding ring from George, her wedding ring from Frank, and a gold, heart-shaped locket containing two locks of hair: one light brown, one blond, twisted together and tied off with a piece of silk ribbon. Sam was almost fourteen now; Jim had just turned ten. They were still her babies, of course, and they still needed her, but they were old enough, she'd decided, to begin exploring their universe on their own.

She was going to do what she could to make that universe just a little bit safer for them.

She was going to find the Romulan bastard who'd killed her husband and her captain, and she was going to destroy him.

*

There was just one problem: she had no idea how to find him. You'd think that a giant space-kraken with enough firepower to cripple a Federation starship in under a minute would be difficult to hide. You'd think people would have seen it and remembered it. There were spies hidden deep within the Romulan Empire; _you would think someone would have seen something._

But the ship that had destroyed the _Kelvin_ had vanished, seemingly without a trace. It was as if the lightning storm that had spat it out had swallowed it up again.

Winona read every mission report she could get her hands on, and plagued every communications officer she knew. But not a single intercepted message made even the slightest mention of that monster ship.

Sometimes, standing on the _Iris_'s observation deck, watching the stars, she'd imagine the distant rumble of thunder and the flicker of lightning.

*

In a smoky bar on Detross IV, Winona met Mektarr, a Klingon woman who had been sent in disgrace from her father's house. Winona bought her a bottle of firewine and a platter of _gagh_. Mektarr and her small crew had been to the edge of the galaxy and back, but they hadn't seen any ships that resembled the one Winona described.

"I have the feeling," said Mektarr, her sharp teeth giving her consonants sibilance, "that anyone who sees that ship – if it still exists at all – do not often live to talk about it. Still," she added, after Winona had slipped her two bars of gold-pressed latinum, "if I hear anything, I shall let you know."

*

She offered nothing material to the Orion pirate she met on Deep Space Station L-5, only a long look at her legs as she made her way toward him and settled herself neatly into the seat opposite his. The new Starfleet uniforms, she thought wryly as he licked his dark green lips, were ridiculously impractical, except for throwing humanoid males off their guard.

Maybe that _was_ their purpose.

She didn't get any useful information out of him, but that was just as well, she supposed as she walked away, all business, no sway in her hips. There were people to whom she couldn't stand to be beholden.

*

Nabati, the other exobiologist on the _Iris_, sat her down once and asked if her mind was really on her work.

"Of course it is," Winona said. "It's just not the only thing on my mind."

"Your boys. I understand."

"I miss them," she said, and something bitter twisted inside her because she felt as if she were lying, even though she wasn't.

 

*

Her captain noticed too. "Lieutenant Kirk," he said, "I realize you left a young family behind on Earth, and I'm not unsympathetic, but we have a mission, and I need to know that you're dedicated to it."

"Sir," she said, hands clasped behind her back, color rising in her cheeks, "I am."

He looked at her for a long moment, dark eyes measuring. "There's no need to be defensive, Lieutenant. I'm not asking you to choose between your family and your career. I _have_ noticed, however, that you sometimes seem distracted. And I'm curious about your interest in the mission reports from the _Reliant_, the _Kepler_, and the _Pegasus_."

"Curiosity," she replied.

"That's all, simple curiosity? Those three ships happen to have been close to the Neutral Zone in recent months, and I know about your connection to the _Kelvin_ tragedy. Lieutenant Kirk, your interest in Romulan activity is understandable, but at present it has nothing to do with finding and exploring Earth-like planets. That is our mission, and that should be your focus."

Holding herself rigid, she said, "Yes, Captain. I understand."

 

*

 

Even though her quarry eluded her and she missed her boys, it was good to be back in space. She'd always loved the idea of hurtling through nothingness on a sleek, elegant piece of machinery, stars and planets and nebulae flashing past. She'd been so bored, growing up on her parents' farm in Iowa. There'd never been a horse fast enough or a tree high enough to satisfy her. There'd never been a man passionate enough, either.

Until George.

Sometimes she felt like she was being unfaithful to Frank, even though she hadn't slept with any of her crewmates and didn't intend to. But Frank was very much a man of the Earth; he liked getting dirt and oil under his fingernails; he liked keeping antique cars in working condition, even though hardly anyone drove anymore; he liked fucking her amid stalks of ripening corn, or against the barn door in the rain.

George, on the other hand…

He was like a shooting star, that man. He flashed into her life and granted as many of her wishes as he could before burning up. Sometimes she lay in bed trying to remember the exact shape of his smile, and the color of his lashes when the sunlight filtered through them. Space was his territory, his stage, and in the quiet of her quarters, he was the one she thought of when she touched herself, not Frank.

So maybe she was being unfaithful to Frank. She couldn't feel guilty about that, because she was being faithful to a part of herself that preceded him, an older, wilder aspect of her nature.

 

*

She took time off when she could. She tried to be home for birthdays, Christmas, her wedding anniversary. Each time, she felt as if she was leaving a little more of herself behind, in space. Frank called her on it once. "Are you even here, Win?" he asked one night, after rolling off her.

"Course I'm here, baby," she said, reaching for him. "Where else would I be?"

"I don't know," he said, evading her hands and slumping onto his side. "But you're not here."

*

She wasn't there when Sam ran away and Jim crashed the Corvette into the Riverside Quarry. She came as soon as she was able, which was about four weeks after Sam turned up at her brother's house in Idaho, and after Frank had decided he wanted out of this marriage.

"It's not even a marriage," he said. "I don't know what it is, but I can't do it. You're not who I thought you were."

Of course. He'd seen the grieving widow with long blond curls and two small boys, and mistaken her for a fallen princess in need of rescuing. But Frank was no knight, and Winona was no princess, fallen or otherwise.

Had she ever really loved him?

"You don't need a husband," he told her as he left the farmhouse for the last time. "Your kids don't need a father, they need a fucking zookeeper. Jim owes me for that car. He's lucky I didn't—"

"You don't wanna finish that sentence," she cut in, and it was as if every nerve and bone in her body had turned to steel. She faced him, the sun slanting into her eyes, and she didn't blink or look away. "And that car was never yours, anyway."

With the light behind him, it was hard to read his expression. She thought his tone had a wistful note, but she might have imagined it. "Neither were you, Win."

After he left, she closed the door and leaned against it. Her heart hammered, but she wasn't angry. She wasn't sad. She didn't know what she was exactly, only that her heart was the only part of her body she could still feel.

A movement at the top of the stairs caught her attention.

Jim.

*

It wasn't easy. He blamed himself for making Frank leave, for not making Sam stay. He blamed her for everything else.

And she didn't know what to do. The last time she'd seen him had been about eight months ago, and he'd seemed so much younger then. He was still twelve, but he was a much _older_ twelve, and she was at a loss. She couldn't curl around him the way she did when he was a baby, shielding him with her body, stroking his fine hair while she sang him lullabies. When she tried to touch him now, he pushed her away.

He was surly and secretive. He stayed out past his curfew, and when he came home, he sometimes looked like he'd been fighting.

She tried to punish him by making him spend the entire next day, which was Sunday, in his room.

He simply opened the window, swung himself down to porch roof, and jumped the rest of the way. He broke his ankle in the process, which she didn't learn until late afternoon when someone from the urgent care clinic called to let her know they had her son. How the hell he'd gotten that far on a busted ankle, she did not want to know.

She tried to get him to see a counselor at school.

He went, but later the counselor told her that Jim had just sat and stared at the clock, and refused to utter a single word. "Whatever he's doing," the counselor offered, like she thought it would help, "it's not affecting his grades. He doesn't always pay attention in class, but he obviously studies hard. His teachers tell me his reports are excellent and his test scores are perfect."

Winona knew she ought to feel a surge of pride, but she took little comfort in the woman's assurance that there was a good brain behind the thick skull.

She was frightened. She wrote to Sam, half-begging him to come home and help with his brother, promising him that everything would be different now that Frank was gone and she was here. He wrote back to say that he didn't want to leave Idaho. He liked living on his uncle's ranch. He was enrolled at the local high school; he had friends there; he had a girlfriend.

What he did not say, but what Winona took from his terse message was: _Jim is your problem._

 

*

Some nights, she sat in bed with the lights on, a datapad propped against her knees, trying to analyze the data she and Nabati had collected.

Other nights, she lay awake in the darkness, the little gold locket – which still contained two curls of hair – cold and heavy between her breasts.

She missed her lab on the _Iris_, and not just for its state-of-the-art equipment. She missed the faint hum of the ship's computers and engines, the friendly little chirrups and beeps. They'd soothed her. Here, the silence – broken occasionally by the sighing of the wind through the trees, the creak of floorboards, or the slam of the door as Jim returned – kept her on edge.

Everything was falling away from her: George, Frank, Sam, her Starfleet career, now Jim.

And her revenge.

This was not the life she wanted.

*

By the time Jim turned fourteen, Winona had just about had it. With his attitude, with Sam's, with Iowa. Starfleet wanted her, and fuck it all, she wanted them.

But she had to find something to do with Jim. She could have sent him to Idaho, but her brother and his wife already had their hands full with Sam, in addition to their own kids. She couldn't burden them with Jim. There were off-planet schools…

"There's Tarsus IV," she said one Saturday afternoon as Jim trudged into the kitchen, still in his pajamas, his bright hair sticking in every direction. "Here," she said, nudging the datachip across the table toward him while he blinked sleepily. "Stick that into your PADD and tell me what you think."

"What is it?" he mumbled, his waxy gaze sliding over the chip to the coffee pot.

"Something you might look into," Winona said with a shrug. Jim's pajama shirt hung open, and she could see the scratches across his ribs. They were crusted with dried blood and she wondered how he'd gotten them: swinging over a fence, maybe, or climbing a tree. "There's a Terran colony there, obviously, and if you went you'd be sort of an intern. You'd work – at a variety of different jobs, it looks like. You'd be—"

"Child labor laws don't exist on Tarsus, huh?" said Jim, pouring coffee into a large yellow mug.

"For God's sake, you wouldn't be in a – a _sweatshop_, Jim." She tried to suppress her exasperation; it was too early in the day for that. "You'd learn some useful skills, maybe find yourself a little direction. It's a year-long program, and there's a school there, so you wouldn't miss anything."

She waited for him to say, _Except my friends,_ but he didn't, and part of her was glad because, while she'd never met his friends, she didn't like them. If they were his friends at all.

"And you'd get to be off-planet," she went on while he slumped into a chair, cradling his coffee.

"Where will _you_ be?" He seemed to be gazing at his coffee; his hair flopped over his eyes, making his expression difficult to read.

"I don't know. Wherever Starfleet sends me, I guess. The _Iris_ is far out right now, but other ships need an exobiologist. Think about it, buddy."

"Fine, if that's what you want," he said, and she decided to take his acquiescence as a good sign.

*

He never sent in his application. Winona didn't find out until long after the deadline had passed. She just assumed he'd gotten in because why wouldn't he? He was such a smart kid, even if he acted stupid. By the time she found out, she'd contacted Starfleet to let them know she was going to be ready for a yearlong assignment, either at a space station or an exploratory vessel.

"So I guess I'll be on my own," Jim said casually.

When she found out what he meant – when she got it out of him – she lost her temper. "God damn it, Jim!" she shouted. "God fucking damn it. Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you tell me? What the hell am I supposed to do now?"

He flared right up, like he'd been waiting for it. "Go!" he snarled back at her. "Just _go_. I'm not stopping you." His voice cracked on the last word, and it hurt her – how very young he was, how very broken, and how _she didn't know what to do._

"James Tiberius Kirk," she started, but he cut her off:

"If you wanna go, _go_. I don't care. I don't give a fuck. I'm used to it."

Something cold and bitter squirmed in Winona's belly. "_Jimmy_."

"Go," he said again, his thin shoulders heaving, splotches of color spreading across his face. "Find your fucking Romulan, I don't give a flying fuck. He's the one you really care about. He's your fucking white whale. I don't mean anything to you. I never did. I'm just a fucking reminder of dad. That's all I am to anyone!"

Looking back, she was secretly proud of the literary allusion. In that moment, though, all she could do was stand there shaking while her son turned on his heel and ran out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

He didn't come back that night. Winona went out looking for him, but she couldn't find him anywhere. He showed up just as she was about to call the police, as if he'd known. Actually, he probably knew exactly how long a person was supposed to wait before reporting another person missing.

He didn't answer when she said his name, her arms half-extended. He didn't look at her. He just brushed past her, taking the stairs two at a time. She let him go.

*

He was out when the Federation planets learned about what had happened on Tarsus IV. Starvation. Hysteria. 4,000 colonists sent to their deaths by Governor Kodos, among them children, the elderly, the infirm…

Winona was waiting on the front porch when Jim finally appeared at the start of the driveway, a slender shadow that flickered in and out of her sight as he moved through patches of deeper darkness. It was past midnight, past moonset. She'd been standing there for hours, wrapped in the quilt George's mother had given her; it was June, but she was freezing.

She let him get about halfway up the drive. Then she started to run. He stopped when he saw her coming, and stood stock still, his hands curled at his sides, his eyes shadowed by his long lashes. He didn't move when she flung her arms and the quilt around him, clutching him to her heart and holding him there. He didn't move, but she felt the way his breath hitched, and that was something, it was enough.

Winona made her choice.

She kissed his cheek and buried her face in his hair – which smelled like sweat and cigarette smoke and God knew what else. She held the quilt around him tightly, and yes, George had held her like that sometimes, but she didn't feel his presence. There were no ghosts watching over her shoulder, no nightmares flickering like heat lightning on her horizon.

She was there and Jim was there, and in that moment, under that empty sky, nothing else mattered.

*

Even after that, it wasn't perfect. Not that she'd imagined it would be. Jim had a fair amount of survivor's guilt: if he'd sent in his application, if he'd gone, maybe some other kid wouldn't have, maybe some other kid wouldn't have died in his place; if he'd gone, maybe he could have done something.

"Don't talk like that, buddy," Winona said, and he stopped, but she knew he kept thinking about it and there was nothing she could do about that.

There wasn't a whole lot she _could_ do to help him, except be there.

Not that she spent every waking minute in the farmhouse, waiting for him to need her. She got a job at the Riverside Shipyard, designing bio labs for the Constitution-class starships being built there. She got some work done on her papers, sometimes with Jim hanging over the back of her chair, correcting her grammar. She dated a couple of guys she met at the shipyard, though neither relationship went anywhere serious.

But she stayed in Riverside, and that seemed to mean _something_ to Jim. He talked to her about the things he was learning at school, and what he was studying on his own. He told her where he'd probably be, before heading out for the night, and he promised he'd be back before midnight.

Mostly, he kept his promises, though he still got into trouble from time to time. Every time he came home with a black eye or bloodied lip, her heart seized a little. But what could she do? He was working something out for himself, and she couldn't interfere. He let people call her when he was too drunk or too injured to get himself home on his own. He called her himself when he ended up in jail after a prank that didn't go quite according to plan, or a party that got too rowdy and had to be broken up by the police.

He always seemed about half-surprised, and maybe a quarter relieved when she showed up to get him, sometimes in her pajamas. He tried to hide it, but she saw.

Once, he even tried fixing her up with his arresting officer. The little shit.

*

Winona Kirk never did get her hands on Nero. That was for Jim to do. They talked about it when they were finally alone together, after the living and the dead had been honored, and Jim had been given command of _Enterprise_.

He acted shy when she told him how proud she was. He actually blushed and ducked his head when she gushed, "But, buddy, you _saved the Earth!_ I _told_ you you'd do great in Starfleet."

She had, many times, between his high school graduation and her acceptance of a position at the Adena II Research Station, which was where she'd been when Nero attacked Vulcan. Every time she'd brought it up, he'd shuddered dramatically and said, "I'm not Dad. Rules and regulations? C'mon, Mom."

How in the hell Christopher Pike had talked him into enlisting, Winona did not know. Three years after she'd left for Adena, she'd gotten a message from Jim that said only, _So, Mom, guess what._

Jim got a little defensive when she told him how worried she'd been. First she'd heard that all the cadets had been sent to assist the threatened planet. Then she'd heard that all but one ship had been destroyed shortly after coming out of warp. Then she'd heard that her son was on academic suspension and had not been assigned to a ship. _Then_ she'd heard that no one could find him anywhere on the academy grounds or at any of his usual haunts in San Francisco.

By the time she'd learned that Jim had not only sneaked onto the _Enterprise_, but seized command of the ship and saved the day, she'd been feeling more than a little frazzled.

"What was I supposed to do?" he said while she scowled up at him. "It wasn't even something I decided to do. Blame Spock. He's the one whose ego I bruised by beating his test. Blame Bones. He's the one who wouldn't go into space without me."

She could tell, just from the slant of his eyebrows, that he didn't blame Spock or Bones in the slightest.

He was thoughtful when they talked about Nero.

"I couldn't kill him," he said quietly, as if he were afraid someone would overhear, even though they were the only two people walking that particular path along the bay. "I wanted to. He deserved it. And I don't say that lightly. I don't want to pass judgment, when I'm hardly … anyway." He shoved his hands into the pockets of his red cadet uniform and looked out across the water. He wasn't wearing his medal; she didn't know what he'd done with it. "But he deserved to die. I'm positive he did. At the same time, though…"

She waited, watching him. There was little trace of the wounds he'd received fighting Nero and saving the Earth, but something about him still seemed bruised, and it pained her because it was something she doubted she could ever understand, much less heal. She'd last seen him at Christmas, not quite half a year ago, and he seemed so much older now. He'd lost none of his athletic grace, but he moved with a little more care than she remembered, as if he were finally aware of his body's limitations.

At length he said, "At the same time … it was almost like he didn't. Like death wasn't enough. And I think that's why I gave him the chance to surrender. Part of me was trying to impress Spock, show him I could do diplomacy too, but another part of me knew that nothing I could've done to him – to Nero – would've been enough. If it had just been about Dad… But it wasn't anymore. It was six billion people, and I didn't have the right to speak for them. So I offered him the chance to surrender and answer for what he did. He didn't, and I'm kind of glad, but for fuck's sake, after all that…" He laughed without humor.

She should have felt regret. For all the time she'd spent chasing something that had never been part of her destiny. For all the ways Jim had been hurt. But when she inhaled, all she tasted was the pure, cold sweetness of the air, and all she felt was _free_. Impulsively, she grabbed Jim's hand and clasped it between hers. He didn't flinch.

"Have I ever told you how much I love you?"

"I don't know," he said, looking at her, then looking away quickly. Not so quickly that she missed the sudden startled flutter of his lashes. "Yeah, maybe. Probably. Sometime when I wasn't listening."

"Well, buddy," she said, "listen good."

2/20/10


End file.
